When you see something every day, it gets into your brain.

I didn't think of being an artist until after I went away to boarding school. There were other things to be interested in. And it seemed like a nightmare.

All I can say is that when I paint, I am looking at things that are in the world.

Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it... that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.

I just want to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of frends who like me.

It was men, not God, who had done those things...

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

...I should have people around bugging me and getting under my skin because without people I could not grow - I could not grow in God, and I could not grow as a human.

To be a teacher you must be a prophet - because you are trying to prepare people for a world thirty to fifty years into the future.

There's always going to be criticism when your name is Jalen. You have to wear a bulletproof vest and be ready for it.

Maybe other people will try to limit me but I don't limit myself.

To comfort a sorrowful conscience is much better than to possess many kngdoms; yet the world regards it not; nay, condemns it, calling us rebels, dissturbers of the peace.

The notion of 'history from below' hit the history profession in England very hard around the time I came to Oxford in the early 1960s.

Believing in yourself is essential to creating lasting change and a happy life.